Don't Try To Find Me: A Novel

by Holly Brown

  If Strickland keeps digging around, this might be the next story to break. MY LOVER, MY DRUG PUSHER—that’ll be a great headline. Or no, it’ll be something like BLACK WIDOW CONVINCES LOVER TO PRESCRIBE BENZODIAZEPINES. Not catchy enough. Will we get a real headline, or are we still just Internet fodder? I sure don’t feel real, but those reporters and news vans outside suggest otherwise.

  I feel like I’m dematerializing. It started happening in slow motion a while ago, and Marley’s leaving sped it up. For months, I’ve been spacey and unfocused, only half here. How has Paul missed it? Or did he just not care enough to say anything?

  When Michael first started prescribing for me, it didn’t seem like a big deal. It wasn’t some big cover-up. We were sitting in Starbucks talking about my trouble relaxing, which had gone from a long-standing personality quirk to an undeniable problem. I’d even had a full-blown panic attack, my first ever. It wasn’t nearly as bad as Marley’s had been, no trip to the ER for me, but still. It scared me.

  I didn’t connect it to Michael’s presence in my life, to all the tumult he was causing, and now I wonder if he had connected those dots and thought it was in his interest to take care of it.

  No, he saw that I was in distress and he wanted to fix it. He’s always had something of a savior complex. It’s served him well in his job, but once he was partially retired, he needed something more. He won’t admit it, but that’s part of his attraction to me.

  So he wrote me a prescription for a few pills, almost like an experiment, and I filled it, paying in cash. I guess the idea was that I’d go to my regular doctor if they worked or get my own psychiatrist, but we didn’t talk it through fully. Life got busy, and so Michael wrote me another prescription.

  Did he get off on it, being my savior? I don’t know. I think he liked that we were in this together. It was something no one else knew about; it was our secret. He was able to do something for me that Paul couldn’t.

  I didn’t abuse the medication. If I was worrying about Marley—like when she got accused of cheating at school, and I had this inkling of a suspicion that she’d played me, and it was easier to take a pill than ruminate on it—or feeling generally keyed up, I’d take it as Michael directed, as needed. The jumbo bottles were because I was moving away, not because I’d been taking that many pills.

  Since Marley’s been gone, I need more pills than I would ordinarily, but these aren’t ordinary times. I would have had a right to take more sooner, and I haven’t. I’ve held out.

  I shouldn’t call Michael. Because he’s in hot water, too, and because he turned Marley away. But the betrayal doesn’t feel so acute now. He’s only human. He made a mistake, an error in judgment. He didn’t know what was to come. Who am I to throw stones? I miss him. He’s always shown me compassion.

  I shouldn’t reach out to the man who loves me when my own husband (who theoretically loves me) is downstairs ignoring me, but if I don’t reach out to someone, I’m going to swallow every last one of these pills in the hope of never waking up.

  I make the call from the bathroom floor in my nightgown, the gilded legs of the claw-foot tub inches from my face. I’m a total cliché, a Judy Garland wannabe, my pill bottles in my hand, the cell phone on speaker on the tile. All I need is for someone to hear me downstairs and to transcribe and post this conversation for posterity.

  Michael’s not answering.

  So I call again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And again.

  And finally, there he is. Whispering, like he’s stepped out of a session. I can see his office with its brightly painted shelves, the menagerie of toys and games, and the miniature easel set up in the corner. I can see ten-year-old Marley sitting on the floor, cross-legged. “I’m so happy to hear your voice,” he says. “I really wish I could talk to you, but it’s complicated over here—”

  “It’s complicated over here, too.”

  “Is that her? Are you talking to her?” Alicia is yelling. So he’s not at the office, he’s home. I know from everything he’s said that Alicia isn’t a yeller. Well, join the club. We’re all behaving out of character. I’m not normally a suicidal drug addict rolling around on my bathroom floor.

  “I can’t take it,” I moan. “I really can’t.”

  He puts his hand over the receiver and shouts back, “Yes, it’s her! She’s falling apart! She doesn’t have anyone else to call! Her daughter could be God knows where! Let me be a human being here, will you!”

  “Go to hell!” Alicia screams. “Go to hell, Rachel!”

  Already there.

  “I’m going outside,” he tells Alicia. “Don’t follow me.”

  Historically, he and Alicia have had a very civil marriage. Courtly, companionable, and passionless. But isn’t that what they all say, all the married men who are trying to get laid?

  “Jesus,” he says. I assume he’s outside now. “She’s lost her mind.”

  “Public humiliation. It does funny things to you,” I mumble. The tile is cold against my cheek. I realize that I’m starting to act the part of the boozy floozy, and it’s not entirely unenjoyable. I’m not Judy Garland; I’m late-period Marilyn Monroe. That moment where you let yourself go, where you float away, it has to be liberating, right?

  “Are you abusing the Klonopin, Rachel?” He’s Dr. Michael now. Competent, caring, trustworthy—the psychiatrist everyone loves to love.

  “And the Ativans,” I say.

  “How many have you taken this morning?”

  “Only a few more than prescribed.” I finger the label of one of the bottles. “I’m thinking of taking the rest.”

  “How many pills are left in the bottles?”

  “I haven’t counted. Do you think she’s ever coming home?”

  “Yes. I really do.”

  “Why would you think that? It’s been three weeks.” I feel like I’m crying, but no tears are coming out. I’m making a terrible sound, like a beached seal.

  “I know your relationship with Marley. I’ve watched you worry about her—”

  “That’s all I do is worry about her, all I’ve ever managed to do for her—”

  “—and love her,” he says, interrupting me right back. “You’ve shown her incredible love, and she loves you, too. I know she does. It’s strong, the bond between a mother and a daughter. She’s coming back.”

  I have this strange feeling, this sense that this is my chance. He might finally break confidentiality, if I finesse it, if I push the right brick in the wall. But which brick is it? “I don’t think she’s coming back. You know that, too. You know what she told you about me.”

  “What’s that?”

  “She said”—think, Rachel, think—“I’m not worth respecting. That I let her father walk all over me. That I worry but I don’t do anything. I’m all intentions, no action.”

  Apparently, I’m close enough to the truth, because he says, “She only thought that sometimes. The important thing is the bond between you. She knew who the real problem was.”

  My breath catches. This is more than he’s ever revealed from treatment. “Paul,” I say.

  “He was domineering. He took your power away, and he tried to take her power away. He wanted to make all her decisions.”

  She was a prepubescent girl then. He’s her father. Of course he needed to make some decisions for her.

  “She had to distance herself from him, if she wanted to have a self at all.”

  “That’s what you told her?” Angry as I am at Paul, confused as I am, it doesn’t sound quite right.

  “That’s how she saw it. My job was to validate her reality.”

  Was that his job, really? I try to remember the therapy courses I took in college so long ago.

  “Rachel?” He sounds worried, like he might have said too much. “I helped her. You know that.”

  It’s true. He did. And he’s helped me, too, hasn’t he?

  “She loves you, Rachel.”

  �
��Say it again.”

  “She loves you very much.”

  “Will she still love me after it comes out about you and me? Or do you think she already knew, and that’s why she . . . ?” I can’t say the rest.

  “I’ll tell you this. When she came to see me again, she didn’t know about us. There’s no reason to think she’s found out since.”

  “Except that it’s all over the Internet right now.”

  He doesn’t have an answer for that.

  “I’m sorry, Michael. I feel like I’ve screwed everything up.”

  “It’s not you. It’s Paul. File it under narcissism. He’s the one who started the website without even consulting you.”

  “He sort of consulted me.” I never spoke up. I was too chicken to confess.

  “You don’t have to make excuses for him.” He starts speaking more rapidly. “Listen, I want to help you, but it’s hard right now. Alicia is furious, as you probably heard. I’ve told her that you and I haven’t had sex but she doesn’t believe me. I’ve told my kids that it’s all lies and innuendo and I’m not sure they believe me either.”

  I hope Strickland is wiretapping this. “No one can believe that we haven’t had sex. Officer Strickland was here insisting we had.”

  “The police have been here, too.” He lowers his voice. “Alicia is making it sound like I was planning to run off with you. Like I’m hiding money.”

  I want to ask if it’s true, about the money, but I don’t want him incriminating himself on the off chance there is a wiretap. “Strickland makes it sound like we had a motive for doing something to Marley.”

  “It’s insane.”

  “That’s what I told him.”

  Long pause. “You said ‘we.’ We might have had a motive. I thought they were here investigating you. Do you mean they’re investigating me?”

  “You wouldn’t talk to them.”

  “That’s because I didn’t want to incriminate you. I didn’t realize . . .” He pauses again. “Do they know that I was in town that day?”

  “There were witnesses in the Starbucks.”

  He’s silent, calculating.

  “I know you didn’t harm Marley,” I say. Are you recording this, Strickland? I hope you are. “And I didn’t harm Marley. The police will have to realize that.”

  “But it could spread on the Internet. I could be implicated. I have my practice. I think it can survive the infidelity talk, but the idea that I hurt a child, or if there’s talk about the pills . . . I have a reputation, Rachel.”

  It sounds so pompous, his talking about his reputation. I have a reputation, too. I exist, too, Michael.

  I lift myself off the floor and lean back against the tub. The pill bottles in my hand look like a prop, so I set them down. “I’m getting trashed in the media. I get interrogated every other day. There’s a guy with a beret camped out in front of my house.”

  “It’s not the same thing.”

  “No, it’s worse. My daughter’s missing on top of it.”

  “You’re right,” he says. “Of course. Marley’s the most important thing.” But I can tell that he’s preoccupied, thinking of himself. I can’t entirely blame him. He’s just learned he’s a suspect. I know what that feels like.

  There seems to be enough blame to go around. He wants to put it all on Paul, but we’re all implicated. Did he really validate Marley’s “reality” that her father was domineering, that she needed to pull away to maintain a sense of self? I’m no child development expert, not like him, but is that a reality that should be affirmed?

  “Marley is the most important thing,” I repeat.

  “Yes.” There’s less conviction now that his ass is seemingly on the line. Oh, Michael. You’re just like the rest of us.

  I feel this fondness for him, like I’m looking back over my shoulder, like we’ve passed into retrospect. It already seems crazy that I ever considered hurting myself when Marley’s out there, somewhere.

  I’m her mother. That means everything.

  Day_22

  THIS ISN’T LIKE THE Wyatt lie. If B. would lie about something as basic as what he does all day, if he’d invent a whole life, then who knows what he’s capable of? And then there’s the information I found online, which tells me he’s capable of a lot.

  Okay, slow down. I need to rewind. Start at the beginning. Maybe it’s not as bad as I think.

  So . . . B. had agreed we should get in the car and go north, go coastal, go anywhere. “We’ll scout out locations,” he said. “Like for a movie,” I answered. We were finishing each other’s sentences, like I always imagined. We were about to have the road trip montage.

  B. agreed to miss his Thursday and Friday classes since he didn’t have any papers or exams. “Let the professors miss you!” I said. “They’ll be stuck with all the rich assholes!” Then we were like two little kids, rolling around and tickling each other.

  But this morning, B. changed. He kept stalling, saying there were errands he needed to run and routes to check online. I said we should be old-school, use a map, and flip a coin every time we wanted to change direction: Heads we go north, tails we go south. He started to get annoyed with me, said I was rushing him. I felt like he wanted to get mad at me to give him an excuse to back out. But if I pointed that out, I’d make it come true. He’d have his reason.

  So I shut up and let him walk around the apartment, in and out of the bathroom and in and out of the kitchen, room by room. I didn’t say a word, just sat there with my backpack on my lap, waiting.

  “I’m going to run to CVS,” he said. “Do you need anything?”

  “No.” I was about to ask if I could come with him, but then I remembered that I shouldn’t be seen out.

  He was gone a really long time. I started to panic, thinking he’d decided to ditch me altogether. I would have blown up his phone with texts, but I still can’t find Trish’s cell.

  Finally, he walked in. “What’s going on?” I asked him. “Are you afraid to do this?” I meant to sound supportive, but it didn’t come out that way.

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” he snapped. “I like to be prepared. I like to take my time. I don’t like being rushed.” He got really loud on “rushed,” practically roared it. I realized it wasn’t such a good idea, this road trip, going someplace new with B. It was a fantasy, that starting over would save us, like when couples who are about to break up decide to have a baby instead.

  He must have seen something in my face because he softened. He said, much more quietly, “I want to make sure I’ve got everything.”

  Then he started going through the kitchen cabinets, all of them, and I saw a few seconds too late that I should have stopped him. It had never occurred to me that his stalling tactic would actually unearth my secret, and he’d be standing in front of me waving the remaining two beers, dangling from their plastic rings, the ones that supposedly strangle fish if people don’t cut them.

  “What’s this?” he demanded. “These aren’t mine!”

  “No.” I was thinking fast, but not fast enough.

  “You’re trying to come up with a lie.” Now he really was roaring.

  “I had someone buy them for me.” He was walking toward me, slowly, and I was thinking of those fish and what it’s like to get strangled.

  “Who bought them for you? You’ve been seeing someone behind my back?”

  “No! I get strangers to do it. Different people.”

  “You’ve done it more than once?”

  I nodded, not wanting to look at him. I knew what he must have felt when he was a kid, wondering if his dad was going to beat the shit out of him.

  “Why’d you do that?”

  “Because I’ve been unhappy. I told you all about it.” That’s it, remind him that I’ve been mostly honest.

  “Before you told me, you were sneaking out and having strangers buy you beer—people who could have recognized you from the posters—and then drinking by yourself? And lying to me?” He wasn’t
moving toward me anymore, but his face was not a good color. It was approaching eggplant. I never realized before how lucky I was, that I’d never seen my father turn that color, that I’d never seen true fury in him or had to feel true fear.

  My dad gets irritated, sure, but I’ve never seen him really angry. I remember how after my mom told him I’d been accused of cheating, he came in my room and sat on my bed. I expected him not to believe me, to think that I could only get a grade that high by cheating. I was prepared for his disappointment (which is what he levels at me instead of anger). But he said that he was proud of me for sticking up for myself. He told me he’d really like to give me a hug. I said okay. It was like 75 percent awkward and 25 percent nice. Maybe 65/35.

  Those are the memories I’m not supposed to think of. They don’t fit the dominant narrative. Dr. Michael taught me about dominant narratives and how sometimes in life, we have to screen out the extraneous stuff, the subplots, the things that don’t fit the real story, so we can see the truth about a person.

  My dad would never come at me like B. did, I know that. It turns out that B.’s dominant narrative . . . well, I’m getting to that.

  So B.’s getting closer, with his eggplant-colored face, and I’m thinking that he can do anything he wants. There’s no one to stop him. No one knows to look for me here. That’s got to be why he contacted me on Facebook, way across the country, and lured me out here. That’s what it was, luring. Being alluring. Telling me what I wanted to hear, even though it wasn’t true. Lying and Luring, that could be the title of B.’s autobiography.

  “I love you,” I told him, not because that’s what I felt but because it seemed like something that might get me out of this. It wasn’t quite opposite-speak, because when I said it, I was hoping the love might still be inside me, in hibernation. I was still hoping this might have a happy ending.

  “You lied to me!” Yeah, that was HIM yelling it at ME. When he’s the real liar. The hypocrite. The pedofile, is that how you spell it?

  But I’m getting to that.

  “I know,” I said, “and I’m sorry. I really am.” Now that was opposite-speak. But it worked, because it was like he’d been the Hulk and then he turned back into whatever the scientist’s name was.